Narendra Pachkhédé 
“The breakdown in the old agreements about reality is now the most significant reality. Reality is not just something given; it’s an argument and always has been.
– Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth, CBC Radio 2021
Many countries held their elections, people voted for new governments, and the cricket World Cup concluded. Films won Oscars, countries went to war, and people died while the saga of the Ambani wedding continued.
The ubiquitous wedding with a constant flood of videos surfacing on social media, the vicarious thrill of partaking in such a grand event was undeniable. Love it or cancel it, it was impossible to ignore. They have averaged an event every five weeks over the past seven months.
Finally, now a public event. The wedding took place on July 12 and a grand reception will be held on July 14. With this culmination, a new notion of publicness emerges where the personal and public conjoin the politics, ethics and emotions in a New India.
Unable to make sense of this display of wealth at a time when quiet luxury is trending, The Guardian called one of the events “an ode to excess” and “unashamedly flashy.” When considering the Ambani wedding, one cannot help but draw a literary comparison to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which vividly captures the spirit and complexities of the post-Gilded Age, portraying the lavishness and extravagance of the Roaring Twenties. Mukesh Ambani mirrors a John Rockefeller, a picture of immense wealth and influence.
Santosh Desai, a cultural commentator, observed, “This trend reflects India, which values grandeur over elegance, where size often precedes quality. This obsession with scale is evident in the grand national monuments erected nationwide. The symbolism of a new India favours size and bold statements over beauty and subtlety.”
Celebrations of this magnitude, invariably, are less about personal joy and more about public spectacle. In societies where modern production conditions prevail, life is an immense accumulation of spectacles. Representation has supplanted everything that people directly lived. As Guy Debord says, “The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people, mediated by images that monetise our friendships, opinions, and emotions.” Our internal thoughts and experiences are now commodifiable assets as we are activated as prosumers, making us content creators rather than passive consumers. However, we often end up just circulating content.
This form of contemporary culture is completely overrun and wholly determined by consumer culture, foreclosing alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Images are powerful as they modulate feelings, gestures, and thinking that affect how we structure existence and define and perceive social space.
The spectacle dominates our everyday language and imagery, influencing how we communicate and exchange ideas within our community. It shapes our ability to interact effectively and intensely with one another.
The spectacle and bare life
If you see what you think you see, then let us turn the tables and ask what you don’t see.
Do you remember the photograph of 36-year-old Inas Abu Maamar weeping as she holds Saly’s sheet-covered body in a hospital morgue? That powerful image, captured by Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem, won him the 2024 World Press Photo of the Year award for depicting a Palestinian woman cradling her five-year-old niece’s body in the Gaza Strip.
The contrast between the Ambani wedding and the ongoing genocide is like watching a split-screen movie where two vastly different worlds occupy the same space. The ongoing Gaza genocide foregrounds the bare life of the Palestinians, which the philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes as a situation where people lack legal and political safeguards, leaving them vulnerable to fundamental survival concerns and draws attention to the complex dynamics of sovereignty and the human condition.
The media’s normalisation of this stark dichotomy serves as a clever mask, blurring the distinct ideas, values, beliefs, and actions and presenting them as an unquestionable reality, conventional wisdom, or unavoidable outcome.
This normalisation process concerns how society regards specific values and behaviours as standard and expected. When we turn “normal” into a verb, we can see that normalisation is a social decision and process that goes unseen and is less likely to be questioned. We take normalisation for granted as a characteristic of everyday power.
In his 1975 work Governing the Social in Neoliberal Times, Michel Foucault compellingly exposes the hidden dynamics of power that shape what is considered normal in society. This power, he argues, not only influences individuals but also moulds ideas and behaviours. Recognising and understanding the mechanisms through which power normalises and shapes subjects in neoliberal societies is essential.
The Ambani wedding during an ambient genocide foregrounds the issue of a contested public imagination and the manufacture of a social imaginary. It is all about juxtaposition, context, and demand for the audience’s attention. It has directly impacted our ability to analyse reality and imagine it.
Imaginal sculpture
The Ambani wedding is like an imaginal sculpture – a meticulous collage of popular culture, tradition, politics and history in which disparate elements resonate harmoniously. It offers a multifaceted exploration of the contemporary moment.
The imagery from the Ambani wedding impels viewers into an immersive exploration, inviting them to decipher the intricate language of our present condition and unearth the underlying archaeology of its structures. This visual spectacle fosters a nuanced understanding of the complicated interplay between memory and political syntax.
In its fleeting materiality, the imagery of the Ambani wedding assumes the role of powerful artefacts of political affect. These circulating images give rise to what Chiara Bottici describes as “imaginal politics,” urging us to rethink how politics and our collective imagination intersect. They invite us to imagine a reality that transcends conventional boundaries, blending the tangible with the intangible and bridging individual and societal perspectives.
The concept of the imaginal stands out as the most compelling theoretical tool for understanding the complex relationship between politics and our capacity to create images. Applying this framework to contemporary politics reveals that it can illuminate many paradoxes. One of the most striking revelations is a political landscape flooded with images yet astonishingly devoid of genuine imagination. This analysis highlights the superficial nature of political imagery while exposing the more profound, often overlooked absence of creative thought that defines our current political climate.
The wedding’s poignant focus on the public sphere and its performativity testify to an unwavering commitment to the public, extending its impact beyond its fleeting existence. Its allure and significance beckon us to engage with a deeply perceptive and evocative narrative, compelling us to fathom the intricate relationship between memory and the syntax of politics on a profound and persuasive level.
As Santosh Desai observed, “Imagine a world where desires know no bounds, financial constraints fade away, and choices are limitless. We often ponder this question in our dreams, which is an opportunity to explore what could be. Yet, the answer to any question in India inevitably leads to Bollywood.” So, an Ambani wedding needs a splash of Bollywood fantasy. What does that say about Bollywood’s chokehold on our imagination?
But do we have the capacity to imagine? Are we allowed to imagine? Can we build our capacities to imagine? Do we have sites for imagination?
Social imaginary
So, the more profound question is: What does it tell us about the state of our social imaginary?
The social imaginary is the invisible force that holds society together. It creates the network of meanings and structures that guide our actions, values and shared identity.
Social imaginaries explain how social, cultural, and political phenomena are understood and problematised. Explorations of social imaginaries comprise inquiries not only into horizons of cultural meaning that fundamentally shape each society but also into their further articulation as instituted (and instituting) cultural projects of power and social doing.
Emphasising the importance of imagination and creativity in societal change, the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis offers a thought-provoking perspective on how we engage with reality. He argues that we create and explore new paths to understand the world instead of seeking absolute truth. As we navigate this metaphorical labyrinth, we simultaneously build new connections. He asserted that individuals and societies should strive for self-determination and self-creation, rejecting the notion of pre-determined social structures or historical inevitability.
As reality has fallen apart, Castoriadis explains that our social and historical world—our lifeworld—is understood in fragments. We learn it by questioning, debating, and engaging with it. He calls this process “thoughtful doing,” which is crucial for social, cultural, and historical development. Does Ambani’s wedding offer us that moment of thoughtful doing?
Through ‘thoughtful doing’, Castoriadis highlights the importance of active and reflective engagement in shaping our understanding of reality. This approach fosters continuous growth and deeper insights into the cultural and historical contexts that define our lives.
Let’s hope we don’t have to survive a post-wedding avalanche of events.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic, essayist and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.